I'm doing my best to get through 'Ringolevio' this month and I've got only one hundred pages to go. This part of the book gets difficult. It becomes completely immersed in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco in the run-up to the Summer of Love and Grogan clearly became obsessively immersed in the politics of that time. Even when writing the book a couple of years later he seems unable to detach from the petty irritations that obviously drove him nuts, and was certainly still plagued by the bigger, impossible issues the Diggers wanted to tackle. The whole book becomes tied up with arguments and paranoia and the struggle to explain the fine line that Grogan felt differentiated the Diggers from some kind of hippie social workers. His fury with other figures on the scene at that time, like Stokely Carmichael and Abbie Hoffman, is a little hard to understand but seems to be rooted in the very fact that they were becoming famous. In Grogan's opinion they sought fame whereas he sought anonymity. His protestation that he wanted anonymity becomes confused a little by the ego that shines out through the entire book.
But there's still a lot that is refreshing, even as the book becomes bogged down in a cultural era that feels stale now. Grogan is scathing of the Summer of Love, describing it as a lie perpetuated by the Haight-Ashbury shopkeepers who were to profit from it. He criticises the hippie scene as 'pleasant fakery', and describes all those middle class young people as 'poverty tourists'. He seems by this stage both enamoured and disgusted by the Haight-Ashbury scene.
As a reader though, who grew up in the Eighties when all aspects of the Sixties were touted as some golden era, it's a relief to read an alternative narrative of the Summer of Love. It's good to have suspicions that the whole thing was a huge, mediated piece of theatre partly confirmed, even if it is by an increasingly unstable, unreliable narrative witness.
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